ight-house--of respectability and benevolence, and bushel coverings
were relegated to their proper place outside his scheme of life. His
charities were large, wide-spread, religiously advertised in the
donation columns of the daily papers, and doubtless palliated the
effects of multitudes of other people's sins.

He was a church-warden, president and honorary treasurer of numerous
philanthropical societies--in a word, at once a pillar and
corner-stone of his profession, his church, and his country.

He was also a smug little man with a fresh, well-fed face, bordered by
a touch of old-fashioned, gray side-whisker, rather outstanding blue
eyes, and he carried, and sometimes used as it was intended to be
used, a heavy gold pince-nez, which more frequently, however, acted as
a kind of lightning-conductor for the expression of his feelings. A
pince-nez of many parts:--now it was a scalping-knife, slaughtering
the hopes of some harried victim of the law; and again, it was a baton
beating time to a hymn or the National Anthem; possibly it was, in
moments of relaxation, a jester's wand poking fun at ancient cronies,
though indeed a somewhat full-blooded imagination is required for
that. I have heard that once when, in the fervour of a speech, Mr.
Pixley dropped his pince-nez among the reporters below, he was utterly
unable to continue until the fetish was recovered and handed back to
him. It is an undoubted fact that though you might forget the exact
lines of Mr. Pixley's face and even his words, you never forgot the
fascinating evolutions of his heavy gold pince-nez. Like a Frenchman's
hands, it told even more than his face or his words.

He had a good voice, and a deportment which had, without doubt, been
specially created for the chairmanship of public meetings. And he was
Margaret Brandt's uncle by marriage, her guardian and trustee, and the
father of Charles Svendt, on whose account Lady Elspeth had thought
well to throw out warning hints of possible paternal intentions
respecting Margaret and her fortune.

From every point of view Graeme detested Mr. Pixley, though he had
never passed a word with him. He was too perfect, too immaculate. His
"unco' guidness," as Lady Elspeth would have said, bordered on
ostentation. The sight and sound of him aroused in some people a wild
inclination towards unaccustomed profanity and wallowing in the mire.
He was so undisguisedly and self-satisfiedly better than his fellows
that one f